Speaker: Timothy Gutmann

Timothy Gutmann’s talk has three parts: discussing modern social and political work that he is calling progressive power, exploring visions of universal education of 19th and 20th-century Egyptian ʿulamāʾ, and understanding the changes these made to older norms of knowledge and learning. The presentation asks to think beyond the opposition of old and new and about modernizing processes understand and use tradition.

BIO: Timothy Gutmann is an advanced PhD candidate in religion at the University of Chicago. His dissertation is titled “Conscripting Tradition: Islam, Confucianism, Modernity” about how modernizing processes interpret and change older understandings. His research and teaching focus on East Asian and Islamic traditions. He teaches at St Francis College in Brooklyn, New York.